Wednesday, July 10, 2013

15 things Apple won’t let you see

If it's Wednesday it must be Morford kvetching about Apple's app-approval funhouse of hoops. Eh.

It is, in turns, a fascinating and infuriating process, getting an innocuous little iOS app approved by Apple’s overburdened team of App Store approvers, people who, since no one knows for sure, we can hereby imagine as an exhausted squad of overworked groaners perpetually terrified of getting the company sued and/or earning it any sort of negative media attention by signing off on an app that’s even slightly salacious, pornographic, offensive to Mormons, racist, sexist, repulsively violent (hi, NRA!), or invented by lonely Harvard frat boys drunk on Coors Light and pimpled sighs (Hi, Zuck!)...

Long story short: I’m not really all that proud to say Apple rejected my little app six times in a row, and each time I’d strip out more of MOAN’s content, trying to find the line, trying to figure out just how Puritanical Apple really is, and how seemingly random, and how silly. The entire time, we never had a clear idea. All we had were a stack of brief email rejections, telling us we’d violated the guidelines, but not exactly sure how....

By the time we finally launched the app in March, my team was exhausted. After all, it’s just a shrewd little vanity app. From a freelance columnist/yoga teacher, just trying to stay afloat in a heartless media world. This ain’t exactly Instagram. I’m not the NYT....

(P.S.S. to Apple: I still love you madly, fruit people. I understand your plight; I know even you understand the anti-smut rules are sort of ridiculous. And it’s true that Android’s app store is total chaos. You’re keeping iOS at least passably functional, clean and healthy. But come now. Readers need a live link to the best articles on oral sex ever written [see the app]. And you made me point them to Google instead! Tragic, is what it is).

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